On the Winter Solstice I went to the Oregon Coast, only to find it
covered with hundreds of dead birds. Their fresh corpses lay scattered
along that morning’s hightide mark on Gearhart Beach.
I was alarmed.
The birds’ feathers were barely ruffled, like dead birds in a
still-life painting. Scavengers avoided them. Except one seagull who
took a single peck, then left to wash out his beak in the sea, shaking
his head No! No! No!
What killed this huge flock of birds all at once? Was it mass
starvation? Not enough food in the changing ocean currents of melting
ice caps? Too weak to continue flying in the extreme winds of changed
global climate? Like feathered rain they dropped into the sea, which
regurgitated them onto the sand.
I was alarmed.
So, I consulted the oracle of news, Google, expecting to find an
article addressing this alarming event. But I found none. Instead I
found
“Dead birds on beaches no cause for alarm.” It was the headline of a 1992 print article
Google had chosen to scan and digitize online, with the added
commentary, “No related articles.” But what about December 21, 2014, 22
years after that alarming article?
I searched some more and learned that for the past couple of decades,
or more, volunteers have been walking beaches, and compiling mountains
of reports of dead birds. Some of these groups are:
Bay Keeper in San Francisco,
Coast Watch in Oregon, and
Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) in Washington state.
How connected are these groups? It seems pretty scattered. COASST has a
blog where it mentions being connected to none of the above, but only to
Beach Watch in San Francisco (not to be confused with the afore mentioned
Bay Keeper),
BeachCOMBERS in Monterey, California, and the
British Columbia Beached Bird Survey. And what about the December 24th
News Lincoln County article about
the bird corpse apocalypse? It calls for citizens to carry cameras and
take pictures of the dead birds washed ashore from the
global-climate-changed acidic seas, and
email the photos to
biologist Douglas Cottam of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. I wouldn’t know what to do if I received hundreds and thousands of photos of dead birds in my email inbox. Poor Mr. Cottam.
It sounds like a lot of us are worried and trying to do something,
and our efforts are scattered.
Meanwhile, big business and their
politician puppets keep on delaying coming to any meaningful agreement
to cut greenhouse-causing emissions, as seen in the recent
Lima Climate Summit.
And all of us alarmed at the bird corpses washing in with each high
tide, which are ignored by the media. So many different groups and
people trying to do good, yet scattered. Not yet united.
Divide and conquer is a time-tested method of social control. The
reports are divided and not looked at as a whole. While dead common
murres and cassin’s auklets wash up repeatedly on the North Coast of
Oregon, in San Francisco the self-described “novice birder” who heads
the environmental organization
Bay Keeper claimed in a 2011 article that common murre nesting populations are
“On the Comeback Trail” on the tiny rocky Farallon islands outside of the Golden Gate (where over
47,000 metal barrels of nuclear waste
rust where they were dumped on the sea bottom 300 feet below in the
1950s-1970s). Yuck. Would you want to raise your babies in a place like
that?
Then there’s the tactic of turning a blind eye to the true culprits —
multi-national corporations. COASST, despite all its good work, hides
neoliberal military-industrial complex culpability by not including
effects of
global warming as a “human” factor
in its cataloging the massive deaths of birds. It turns a blind eye to
actions by the military industrial complex, unless it is something
visible that obviously killed a bird, such as an oil spill or physical
objects. Lack of food and extreme weather because of ocean currents
shifted with the melting of the ice caps because of human actions and
policies are ignored as causes of the massive die-offs. Those die-offs
are labeled “natural.”
So, it seems that earnest volunteers braving all kinds of weather to
walk the beaches counting bird corpses on the West Coast of the United
States are having their findings stymied by being divided
geographically, organizationally, and/or categorically. The truth is
being hidden through divide and conquer. I wrote to COASST, suggesting
they coordinate with more groups, such as the ones mentioned above.
Their response did not arrive in time to quote in this article.
As far as I can tell, there is no one looking at the big picture.
According to Google, rarely does this ongoing massacre of birds get reported in the media.
One exception was in 2012 when the Press flocked to the Japanese dock
that washed up on an Oregon beach after it broke off in the “new
normal” extreme weather of a tsunami, which also triggered a nuclear
meltdown in
Fukushima. Those reporters and camera operators couldn’t ignore the hundreds of dead birds all around them.
One article
mentioned the Japanese dock and bird corpses and blamed pelicans. It
was not looked at in context of continuing shorebird die-offs.
Die-offs of meres and auklets have become so commonplace that COASST seabird program coordinator
Dolliver described it as sporting event:
“Both species have different life
histories but are constantly in competition for the top dead bird of
each year. They drive a lot of baseline patterns we see every year
because they are the top players . . . “
I am alarmed.
Auklets eat krill in the sea. Krill that are often no longer there from
changing ocean temperatures and
increased acidity.
The birds are divers and swimmers, not strong flyers, and get swept to their deaths by
bigger and stronger storms. Meanwhile
corporations profit from disaster “relief.” Profit is the legally mandated mission for corporations.
Empathizing with our sister and brother creatures here on Gaia and
preventing disasters before they occur is not included in an
accountant’s “bottom line.”
Since the news didn’t mention the hundreds of dead birds I saw, I emailed Phillip Johnson, president of
Oregon Shores Coast Watch.
He forwarded my question to the group and volunteers responded that
they had counted hundreds of dead Cassin’s Auklets last Sunday, the same
day I visited the beach. It was just the latest in a long series of
corporate mass murders. Here I quote directly from our email
conversation:
“I put out the word to our Clatsop County
mile adopters, and sure enough, I heard from a number of them that they
had seen large numbers of beached birds after the last storm. I was
right–most of them are Casssin’s auklets. One response noted 30 dead
birds in the space of a quarter-mile, and noted:
Cassin’s
Auklets – They have been washing up dead on the beaches for several
months but in larger numbers after the most recent storm. Bad year for
the seabirds – no food in the ocean.
Another read:
There are hundreds of dead birds on the northern beaches. They’re auklets.
And a third, from a CoastWatcher who is
also a volunteer at the Wildlife Center of the North Coast and
participates in CoastWatch’s beached bird survey:
The majority of the dead birds are auklets; especially the little cassin’s auklet. There are also dead common murres.
So, what I speculated yesterday is pretty much right–the ‘wreck’ of Cassin’s auklets continues . . . “
None of this was mentioned in the mainstream news. Big business owns
the major media outlets. What else are “they” not telling us?
The day I visited the Coast and mourned at the sandy tombs of these
gentle beings was the Winter Solstice. Longest night of the year. The
return of the sun. Of the light.
When will our long night of global corporate greed and killing finally fade away into the light?
I am alarmed, yet I have hope.
First published as "Why is the Beach Covered with Dead Birds?" on blogcritics
